With watercolors, O’Keeffe was an intuitive, surprising artist, but only because she was a technically rigorous one first. Choosing the right paper narrowed the range of outcomes without avoiding risk altogether. In 1916, she opted for a tissue-thin Japanese kind that warps with the slightest moisture. In the resulting quartet of “Blue” watercolors, the paper looks like a desert, but the brushstrokes seem as fresh as rain; it’s a controlled demolition of the blank page.
My favourite passage is Arn’s description of O’Keeffe’s three portraits of Paul Strand:
O’Keeffe is great with skies, suns, mountains, and smoke. With people, she’s more hit or miss. The Delaney portraits are nice, though head-only; the nude self-portraits are as stiff as first-year figure drawings. Tellingly, the three best portraits in the exhibition, watercolors of her friend Paul Strand, don’t look like anyone (though, as the critic Thomas Micchelli helped me notice, they do look like someone’s intestines, floating in a many-colored cloud). O’Keeffe is nobody’s idea of a comedian, but the Strand trio could almost be a prank: the great black-and-white photographer gets thrown into a smeary rainbow dunk tank.
That last sentence made me smile. This is my first experience of Arn’s writing. I enjoyed every word. More Arn, please.
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